What is it about?
In Angela Carter’s writing, wolves are anthropomorphised, liminal beings. Her wolves are women, men, and something in between; wild and domestic; ferocious and frightened. Concentrating largely on Carter’s 1979 collection of short fiction, The Bloody Chamber, and Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves (for which Carter and Jordan co-wrote the screenplay), our essay will consider the meaning of Carter’s shifting representations of wolves. Taking as our starting point Carter’s feminist engagement with the politics of gender within her stories, we consider her equally radical engagement with constructions of the animal. Carter projected an economy of representation onto the body of the wolf in which multiple (and ever-multiplying) signs of the human and animal embody differing registers of value. By writing the wolf in this way, she insistently gestures to the deeply interconnected politics of gender and animality.
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Why is it important?
We argue that Carter’s distinctly gendered ways of being in the world are aligned with and inseparable from her evocation of the sensational, in all senses of the word. Using Carter’s wolves as the key organising principle, we consider psychological readings of the narratives and theoretical frameworks developed within the field of animal studies.
Perspectives
We had a fantastic time working together on this chapter. Laura came at it from the perspective of animal studies and art history, while David's expertise in film studies and literature allowed us to take an interdisciplinary look at the fascinating way Angela Carter repositioned the role of the wolf in the story of Little Red Riding Hood.
Dr Laura D. Gelfand
Utah State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Two-Legs Looks, Four-Legs Sniffs: Angela Carter Writing Wolves, April 2026, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004754584-011.
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